Parchment and Tallow
by starsailor iphigenia
Summary: Writing with a quill isn't the problem. How does the wizarding world manage to supply itself with all the parchment it needs? Harry finally finds the answer in third year, and also learns why going to Hogwarts includes the risk of Death by Sheep. AUish, definitely crack. More sensible nearly-canon names for Harry's children included.


By the beginning of third year, Harry felt that he had a decent grasp of the quirks of the wizarding world. He could produce a passable essay with a quill, was used to wearing a dress robes for nine months of the year, could carry a candle around at night without dripping hot wax all over his hand, and knew more about medieval plumbing than he had ever wanted to. He knew seventy-eight ways to blow up a cauldron in ten minutes. He knew how to change bits of things into other bits of things he might need. He knew how to make his wand light up so that he didn't have to carry around a dripping candle as soon as it got dark, which was in the middle of the afternoon during wintertime.

All in all, he thought he was surviving pretty well in the wizarding world for someone who had been flung into it and never given any formal instruction on its strange cultural heritage. Returning to Hogwarts for the school year did feel like coming home.

One thing he didn't think he would ever get used to, though, were the sheep.

They were _everywhere_.

Oh, there were also cows, pigs, goats, deer, rabbits, and the occasional flock of hens, ducks, or peafowl as well, but mostly it was sheep. Everywhere.

Literally everywhere.

He passed a dozen in the halls on his first day of third year classes. That morning he had found Neville and Seamus evicting one from the dorm bathroom, where it was trying to get a drink out of one of the toilets. Something nudged his knee during dinner. He didn't look to see what it was. He knew it wasn't Ron or Hermione.

The problem was, Hogwarts was so big and old and had so many doors, it was impossible to keep them all closed all the time without putting the school into lockdown. Some well-meaning student was always accidentally leaving a door open for a minute without standing in it, and then a curious sheep would enter. And where one sheep went, all the rest of its friends would follow.

There hadn't been quite as many around at the end of the last year. The basilisk had been eating them, apparently.

That was what had finally gotten the attention of the school board. The disappearance of the sheep had brought the people of Hogsmeade down on them, complaining that those dratted students must be up to something. Then someone had noticed the petrified students in the infirmary and it had all ended with an evacuation order over a long weekend and almost the entire force of Aurors swarming around the castle until they found the entrance to the Chamber and killed the basilisk.

Harry had had to open it for them. It had been interesting but rather smelly. There had been a lot of sheep bones down there.

The sheep had also saved the Weasley girl from being implicated in the crime. Everyone was convinced that it must have taken a very dark object to make a _Weasley_ endanger a _sheep_. Harry didn't really get that, but nobody bothered to explain it to him. He assumed that either the Weasleys really loved sheep or they were magically sworn to not act against them or something.

What with the dementors all around the school this year, the sheep that came in were sometimes covered in frost and ice. They didn't seem to mind; they and the monsters mutually ignored each other. Harry picked small icicles off the one that wandered into his morning class and stood beside his desk. It appeared to be thankful, and tried to eat the hem of his robes. He shooed it off.

When he had first arrived he had thought the sheep had some kind of magical significance. Maybe they were people. Maybe they were good luck. Maybe they were a strange sort of teachers' assistant. But no, it appeared that they were just regular sheep that were everywhere in Hogsmeade and spilled over into the Hogwarts grounds and the castle itself.

They weren't that messy or anything, they were just . . . there. All the time. He sometimes woke up to one staring at him from the floor. How they got up the stairs he could never find out.

"Ron?" he said one night, when all the boys were in the dorm, the fire was roaring comfortably, and a sheep was serving as a table for Ron and Seamus to play chess on.

"Yeah?"

"Why are there sheep everywhere?"

Ron looked surprised and then shrugged. "Dunno, mate. Probably because it's warm in here."

"But . . . sheep. Why do wizards keep so many sheep? What are they for?"

"Parchment," said Neville from his bed.

Harry blinked. "Parchment?"

"Parchment." Neville waved the essay he was working on to illustrate. "See? Parchment. The stuff you buy in the stores is mostly made from sheepskin."

"That's the most efficient," Ron agreed. "Course, snobs like Malfoy make their own. I've heard that all his is made from the skins of unborn hippogriffs."

Neville sighed. "It's peafowl, Ron. They breed them at Malfoy Manor. The hippogriff thing is a myth anyway. It doesn't cure properly."

"I knew that," he muttered. "Anyway, I don't care about birds. My uncle Bilius left me his farm and flock of Cotswolds. That's what I'm going to do when I grow up."

"I thought you wanted to play for the Cannons," said Harry.

"Yeah, but I'll still have the flock. In the background, you know? Dad looks after it for me right now. That's where the wool for our sweaters came from," Ron said proudly.

"But there are even sheep in Diagon Alley!" Harry protested. "In the middle of London! I think I saw some on the platform! Why are there so many?"

Neville looked oddly at him. "Look how many essays we write, Harry."

"The amount of parchment the twins go through by themselves could probably fund a small Muggle country," said Seamus.

"There's only about one small roll of parchment on each sheep, even with the stretching and duplicating charms," said Ron. "A standard roll is three small rolls. Basically, everyone in this dorm uses half a sheep just for taking notes in class every day. Supply has to keep up with demand."

"How do you know so much about this?" Harry asked. He'd never heard Ron sound so knowledgeable about something he couldn't eat, fly on, or use for chess pieces.

"The Weasley Silver Cotswolds are famous," said Neville. "Like the McLaggen Greens. They've been making parchment for generations. The Abbotts have been making pigskin parchment for almost as long, and the Lovegoods breed those Disappearing Golden rabbits, but nothing really beats a nice sheet of sheepskin for everyday use."

"Yeah, even the Muggles bought some of our sheep back before the Statute," said Ron proudly.

"But, if you just use the skin, what happens to the rest of the sheep?" Harry asked.

Ron shrugged. "Mum makes a lot of yarn."

"Haven't you noticed how much mutton we eat here?" Seamus put in.

"So that's why we hardly ever get a nice beef roast," muttered Dean, who had just been listening with his mouth open. There were some things that not even the introductory books for the muggleborn could teach you.

"And of course there's all the candles," said Neville. "Most of them are made of mixed beeswax and sheep tallow. I don't know how, there's special candlemaking charms."

"And soap," Ron added, defeating Seamus and resetting the board. "And some of everything gets sold to the Muggles. Not the parchment, though. That's ours."

"But the parchment is more like paper," Harry protested. "You can't tear Muggle parchment, and it gets wet and moldy."

"Charms," said Ron and Neville together.

Harry groaned and dropped the subject. He didn't want to hear any more sheep-induced insanity.

He eventually forgot about the conversation until one day in what should have been his seventh year, he saw a sheep grazing peacefully in a field by the forest they were hiding in. He'd never thought the sight of a sheep would fill him with homesickness, but it did.

The memory of the sheep stayed with him from then on. Even Hermione got a little nostalgic for the days when their biggest problem was a flock of them blocking the corridor to Charms and the most unpleasant thing that could happen was finding a woolly friend taking a shower with you.

The final battle between Harry and Voldemort was punctuated by comic relief provided by the sheep of Hogwarts, who were annoyed by all the lights and shouting and seemed to take some kind of perverse pleasure in knocking people down and sitting on them, regardless of their affiliation. However, when Voldemort was finally dead and the dust had settled down a little, the grieving survivors found that not as many people were dead as they had thought.

For instance, Fred Weasley had merely been knocked over by a ram he had tangled with on several occasions and hit his head on a rock. He had a concussion and a new aversion to dyeing sheep and locking them in the Headmaster's office, but apart from that he was fine.

Bellatrix Lestrange had been taken down by a sheep that had stepped on the back of her robes, distracting her long enough for Neville to aim accurately.

Voldemort himself had been spectacularly defeated after a sheep banished away from a fight between one of his minions and Professor McGonagall had hit him in the back and pushed him directly into the path of a cutting curse shot by Ginny Weasley at someone who was trying to curse her mother in the back. The sudden decapitation of the Dark Lord had distracted the Death Eater enough for Molly to take him out.

Unknown to anyone, that particular sheep had been born on the last day of July during a Death Eater raid the previous year and so had a noticeable limp where it had been hit by a stray curse from Voldemort himself.

Nineteen years later, Harry looked contentedly over the green fields dotted with the Cotswolds Ron had given him as a wedding present all those years ago, Ginny by his side. His sons James Severus and Albus Sirius were running away from a figure in a horned helmet mounted on one of the biggest rams in the flock. As he watched, Luna Lily jumped from its back, tackled her younger brother to the ground, and methodically smeared mud over his face. The ram butted James companionably in the stomach, making him fall into a large puddle. Ah, the joys of a magical childhood.

All was well.


End file.
